British conquest of India

The British conquest of India was a series of wars fought from 1742 to 1857 in which the British Empire (and its puppet, the East India Company) subjugated the Indian Subcontinent through a series of campaigns fought using mostly Indian troops. The Battle of Plassey in 1757 broke the might of the Mughal Empire, while the Maratha Confederacy was broken up in 1818 following several Maratha wars and the Sikh Empire was conquered in 1849.

Background
The decline of the Mughal Empire gave European powers the chance to expand their influence in India by intervening in the affairs of rival Indian princedoms. After the death of Emperor Aurangzeb in 1707, Mughal rule was soon restricted to the area around Delhi. The new dominant power was the Maratha Confederacy, but smaller states such as Hyderabad, Mysore, and Bengal also flourished. The British East India Company established its first trading post (or "factory") on the Indian coast at Surat in 1612. By the 18th century its factories included Bombay (Mumbai), Calcutta (Kolkat) in Bengal, and Madras. Other European countries also had trading companies, including France. From 1742, under governor-general Joseph Francois Dupleix, the French attempted to drive out the British and extend their influence over India. In 1746 they captured Madras, but it was returned to the British in the peace settlement at the end of the War of the Austrian Succession. Anglo-French rivalry was given fresh impetus by the outbreak of the Seven Years' War in 1756.

History
The British takeover of India began in Bengal at the start of the Seven Years' War. The British and French East India Companies had trading posts, permitted by the Nawab of Bengal (Siraj ud-Daulah). At war with France from May 1756, the British bolstered their defenses in Calcutta in case of a French attack. But the Nawab saw this as a snub to his authority. His forces seized the fort, allegedly causing the deaths of many British soldiers and sepoys (Indian troops) by interning them in the "Black Hole of Calcutta" (a small cell within the fort).

Britain on the offensive
The British sent a small force by sea from Madras, commanded by Colonel Robert Clive, which retook Calcutta at the start of 1757. Supported by French artillery men with heavy cannon, the Nawab led an army more than 50,000 strong to confront Clive, who had less than a thousand European troops and around 2,000 sepoys. However, British leaders had undermined the Nawab's position by intrigue. They had promised the throne to a rival claimant, Mir Jafar, and bribed most of Siraj's commanders. In the battle of Plassey (Palashi), on June 23, barely one-tenth of the Nawab's forces actually fought. The British won what appeared, by numbers alone, an impossible victory and took control of Bengal, with Jafar as a puppet Nawab.

The British victory at Plassey was a setback for French policy in India, and worse followed. The major French settlement was at Pondicherry, which rivaled British Madras on the Carnatic coast. Britain shipped a newly raised infantry regiment, the 84th Regiment of Foot, to India in 1759 and, led by Sir Eyre Coote, it defeated the French under Count de Lally at Wandiwash (Vandavasi) in January of the following year. Pondicherry was placed under siege and surrendered a year later. The French ended the Seven Years' War with only a nominal presence in India. They failed to restore their position when war broke out with Britain again in 1778, during the American Revolutionary War, and Napoleon's later ambitions to rule India remained in the realm of fantasy.

The East India Company's army, consisting of Indian sepoys under Indian NCOs and British ofﬁcers, often aided by elements of the British Army paid for by the Company, was undoubtedly effective. The Company conﬁrmed its control of Bengal with a victory over numerically superior forces, including the Mogul emperor's army, at Buxar in 1764. But it would be a mistake to exaggerate the impact of the European presence at this time or its military superiority. The largest battle fought in India in the mid-18th century was at Panipat in 1761, a conﬂict between an invading Muslim Afghan army led by Ahmad Shah Durrani and the Hindu Marathas. There may have been over 100,000 troops involved in this costly but ultimately inconclusive encounter.

A formidable foe
One result of the battle of Panipat was to facilitate the rise of Hyder Ali, ruler of Mysore, who took advantage of the temporary weakness of the Maratha Confederacy to extend his power in southern India. Between 1767 and 1799, ﬁrst under Hyder Ali and then under his son, Tipu Sultan, Mysore engaged in a series of hard-fought wars against the British, urged on by the French, who provided arms and training, Mysore ﬁelded armies that fought with discipline, incorporating much of the best of contemporary European tactics, including cannon. It also deployed rocket brigades - units of several hundred soldiers armed with explosive rockets ﬁred in salvos from iron tubes - which so impressed the British that they developed Congreve rockets of their own. Tipu Sultan scored impressive victories, notably at Pollilur in 1780 and Tanjore in 1782. It was not until 1799, when Napoleon's invasion of Egypt awoke British fears of a revival of French inﬂuence in India, that Tipu Sultan was defeated. As France's ally, he had to be. The British invaded Mysore with a force that included Maratha sepoys from Bombay, British infantry under Arthur Wellesley (he later became the Duke of Wellington), and the army of the Nizam of Hyderabad. Mysore's capital, Seringapatam (Srirangapatna), was taken and Tipu killed.

The British turned their attention to the Maratha Confederacy, a potential enemy weakened by divisions in its constituent semi-independent states. The Marathas traditionally fought as skirmishing light cavalry, but under French inﬂuence they also had a musket infantry and ﬁeld artillery. In 1803 the British defeated Maratha armies in the north, while Wellesley campaigned in central India. In September Wellesley blundered into a Maratha force at Assaye that was stronger than his own in cavalry and artillery, as well as in overall numbers. He chose to attack across a river and carried the day despite heavy losses.

These victories brought the British large territorial gains, but over the next two years they suffered reverses, and peace in 1805 left the Marathas still independent. It took more ﬁghting, in 1817-18, to break up the Confederacy, leaving Britain in control of the Indian subcontinent up to the Punjab. Company rule extended to northern India after two ﬁercely fought wars against the Sikhs in the 1840s. The Sikh state had been rapidly expanding in the early decades of the 19th century, and its army, the khalsa, was a highly motivated force that had European-trained artillery and uniformed infantry. The key British victory at Sobraon in 1846 cost more than 2,000 British and sepoy casualties. Yet again the British were not militarily superior, but they had an edge that was enough.

Aftermath
The Sepoy Mutiny of 1857 marked the end of an era. The last Mughal was exiled, the East India Company was abolished, and India became a possession of the British Crown. Bengali sepoys mutinied, attempting to reinstate the Mogul emperor as ruler of India. Sufficient sepoys remained loyal for the British to crush the rebellion, which included notable military actions at the siege of Delhi and the relief of Lucknow. Massacres of some British civilians were used as justification for the extreme brutality used when suppressing the revolt.

Afghanistan remained outside the borders of Britain's Indian Raj. In 1839 British forces invaded the country and installed a pro-British ruler, but they were driven out by an uprising in 1842. A second British invasion in 1878 was militarily more successful, but could not subdue the Afghans, who remained independent.